Editor’s note: Today’s guest writer is Timothy Moore, Website Manager for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Here he discusses how they use Google Maps API Premier v3 to power searches and biking directions on BART.gov. BART serves the San Francisco Bay Area covering 4 counties, 43 stations, 104 miles (167 km) of track, and has an average weekday ridership of 335,000 passengers. It is the 5th busiest heavy rail rapid transit system in the U.S.

Recently the BART website (www.bart.gov) launched some cool new trip planning services, including bicycle directions and station area points of interest, using the Google Maps API. The BART QuickPlanner is one of the most popular features on our website. If you live in the Bay Area, chances are you’ve used it. The QuickPlanner has traditionally offered a mix of BART trip plans, directions for walking and driving to the station, connecting transit information, carbon savings and more.

We're always looking for ways to improve the QuickPlanner, so when Google Maps started offering bicycle directions we were green with envy. Our latest research shows that only 4% of BART customers ride a bicycle from their home to a station. With ongoing cuts to connecting transit services and many BART station parking lots filled to the brim, adding bicycling directions to the QuickPlanner will help us promote the option to more than a million website visitors every month.

Frankly we've struggled with the integration of other mapping products into our custom-built BART scheduling application; weak documentation, limited real-world examples, and cumbersome programming requirements. Developing with the Google Maps API was a whole different world. As our lead programmer, Robert Falconer, noted, "It was easy to learn and quick to implement. And the ability to use free-form input terms for addresses, locations and points of interest was a major plus.”

If you've ever had to trap address or landmark input errors you know what he’s talking about. For example, if a user enters in “Frrey Blding” to the QuickPlanner, Google's geocoding service can recognize the user's intent and return the proper term "Ferry Building" with the correct corresponding address. All of this is done seamlessly behind the scenes so that all user sees is the address they are looking for when their trip is mapped out.

Again, using the Google Maps API, we’re able to provide more information about points of interest near BART stations, including directions. If you visit the neighborhood map section you can now use freeform search for station area destinations, and we’re no longer limiting you to searches based on standard address formats or a preset pull down menu. We also use the Google Maps API for services like “Find Closest Station” and for the map images presented on our station landing pages.

Overall this was a really fun project for us. I hope our use of the Google Maps API on bart.gov will encourage more bicycling to BART and I also hope people will use it to discover all of the awesome things that BART station area neighborhoods have to offer.